‘Revenge is sweet and not fattening.’
—Alfred Hitchcock
EVEN for a one-legged cat-throttling necrophiliac, David Fleming was a bad bastard. Fleming was born in Mackay on the Queensland coast. He had an unhappy childhood, dropped out of school and ended up driving earth-moving equipment for a living. In his travels he sired two daughters and a son from different relationships. But he was never a stick-around traditional dad.
Fleming abused drugs and once nearly overdosed on methadone. He was knocked around by depression and a personality disorder. Hospital records show some bizarre admissions that spoke of continued violence or self-harm. Fleming was admitted to Cairns hospital once to have his right pinkie amputated and, on another occasion, with a gunshot wound to his left hand. By some time in the mid-1970s Fleming had returned to his hometown, Mackay, and committed a rape. He was caught, convicted and in 1976 slapped with a 9-year sentence. He served most of it before being paroled.
Upon release he went to a party and tried to strangle a cat. Someone objected and ordered him to stop and back away from the tabby. When he didn’t, the objecting animal-lover shot Fleming in the left leg. Another version ran that the shooting was an accident. Either way, Fleming, the rampaging monster, was wounded but not slowed down. He moved south to New South Wales and, with his shot leg bandaged at the knee, he raped another victim—this time after murdering her.
EVERYONE seemed to like Neutral Bay woman Johanne Hatty. The twenty-four year old worked as a hostess at Kables restaurant at the Regent Hotel in Circular Quay. She lived in the harbour suburb with her boyfriend, Greg Spicer, in a unit close to picturesque Spains Lookout with Kurraba Point Reserve nearby.
On Friday 17 February 1984 Johanne was working late at the restaurant and Greg was working the night shift at the Wynyard Travelodge. The plan was that Johanne would get a few hours’ sleep after work and Greg would come home Saturday morning and wake her for breakfast.
Johanne left work at 1.20 on Saturday morning and drove back home, parking the car at Spains Lookout. When she got out of her vehicle she was suddenly attacked from behind. She was dragged to the nearby reserve and strangled, then sexually defiled after death. Johanne’s killer placed her corpse on a ledge at Spains Lookout, less than a hundred metres from her home. A judge later described it as ‘the crime of a predator who took advantage under cover of darkness of a vulnerable and unsuspecting young woman’.
Greg finished his shift at the Travelodge at 7 a.m. and caught the ferry home with croissants and the newspaper. When he got there at about 7.30 a.m. Johanne’s yellow Gemini was parked near their flat but she wasn’t home. Perhaps she had already gone out, having forgotten their planned breakfast. There was bound to be some innocent explanation. But as more time passed Greg’s state of mind changed from restless to extremely anxious.
Locals found Johanne’s limp body on the ledge and raised the alarm. She was lying on her back and her clothing had obviously been disturbed. Her handbag was beside her body, with the keys to her locked car still in it. Her wallet and bank cards were missing and would never be found.
Later that morning Greg saw a police car in the street outside his block of flats and went to check out what was going on. ‘In one glance I saw her car, the whole of Kurraba Point and the police officers,’ he later recalled.
He followed the commotion only to discover that his girlfriend had been murdered. ‘When I approached the reserve I could see Johanne’s body through [holes in] the stone wall at the edge of the reserve and I instantly asked the policewoman, “Is that person dead?”’
Devastated, he identified her body for police.
WHEN authorities looked around for a suspect they found a pretty good one ridiculously close by. David Fleming was a known rapist with a criminal past living in a boarding house just 600 metres from Spains Lookout, where Johanne Hatty’s body was found. Police were confident that 30-year-old Fleming was the killer but could pin nothing on him. Threads found in Ms Hatty’s hair were similar to those in the common crepe yarn bandages taken from Fleming’s room, but this was not enough. There was semen left in the victim’s body and police took samples. But when Fleming committed his crime in the early 1980s DNA testing did not exist and the investigation stalled.
In 1984 the case stopped turning—but the world did not. In September that year a young geneticist at Leicester University on the other side of the world finished a research project that created the world’s first DNA fingerprint. In the years that followed, the technology improved, became broadly accepted, and revolutionised police investigations around the globe. (It would also change the way some fast-learning criminals committed their crimes.)
Fleming thought he had got away with murder but for two decades technological advances and his own DNA were quietly chasing him down. In the meantime the throttled cat seemed to have its revenge and Fleming’s leg was amputated as a result of the bullet wound. Shortly after that he met another woman and married her. But, to members of the opposite sex, even with one leg David Fleming was a dangerous bastard to know.
Queensland Police later disclosed in court that, as a result of a complaint from his aggrieved spouse, Fleming was recorded on the domestic violence index. But Fleming’s wife later denied ever complaining to police about her husband. In fact, she made a statement describing him as non-violent, considerate and loving. The monster’s wife stuck with him to the end. It seems that, like so many victims of family abuse, she was a prisoner of his violent will. They never had kids and when the amputee became morbidly obese and wheelchair bound she had to act as his carer.
One month after seemingly getting away with the murder of Johanne Hatty, Fleming had, police suspected, struck again, assaulting a 66-year-old Northbridge woman named Thelma Wilcox. And, two months after that incident, police believed Fleming committed yet another violent crime against another female. This time, though, they thought they had enough to charge him.
Police alleged Fleming took a 26-year-old prostitute back to the Neutral Bay boarding house where he now lived, and brutally bashed her with a hockey stick. He then allegedly robbed her of $100 and threatened to kill her if she told police. Fleming was charged with assault and robbery. When he failed to appear at a Sydney court, a warrant was issued for his arrest. The arrest was never executed but seemed to do the job of pushing the dangerous criminal out of New South Wales and back on the road. He reportedly moved to Tasmania and got state sponsorship from the Apple Isle to receive a new artificial leg in the United States. On top of that, a newspaper carried the sad tale of how a David Fleming had been ‘robbed of his life savings’ in the United States, where he was having an artificial leg fitted. The sob story led to Fleming being supported by contributions from locals and given free flights and accommodation.
When Fleming was profiled on the television program Australia’s Most Wanted over his outstanding New South Wales bash–rob charges, his wife phoned police from Queensland insisting that it was a mistake because her husband had never been to New South Wales.
IN 2004 the state of New South Wales formed the Unsolved Homicide Review Unit to apply modern tools like DNA tracking to hundreds of unsolved murder mysteries dating back more than half a century. By then Fleming, in his fifties and a transient truck driver, had moved to another state and was living on a Centrelink invalid pension near Warrnambool in country Victoria.
Police still needed to get a DNA sample from their suspect to check whether it matched the DNA left on Johanne Hatty’s body. They hoped to extract the crucial DNA from a dropped cigarette butt. However, during two days of surveillance Fleming never left his house.
A local copper, Sergeant Vick, had a brainwave on how to net the crucial bit of DNA from their suspect. The officer, who had previously spoken to Fleming about trouble with a drover in the area, went to his house. ‘It’s getting to that time of year again and I want to be prepared if [the drover] comes back this way,’ he told Fleming. ‘Would you be able to draw a map of the area where he was camped?’
The policeman produced a notebook, and Fleming—suitably unguarded after having got away with murder for two decades—started to sketch the map, explaining it as he did so. As Fleming spoke, droplets of his saliva fell onto the page. ‘When he had completed the map, I leant over and closed the book in front of him,’ Sgt Vick said.
DNA extracted from the saliva matched DNA from semen taken from Johanne Hatty’s body found on the ledge all those years ago. The chance of anyone else matching the DNA profile was one in 8.6 billion.
At 7 a.m. on 19 January 2005 arresting officers knocked on the door of David Fleming’s rural house. It is not known whether the bleary-eyed, obese, 51-year-old wheelchair-bound invalid pensioner with one leg contemplated making a break for it. But in the end he went quietly and was arrested on a warrant for the murder of Ms Johanne Hatty twenty-one years earlier.
The same month, Fleming was extradited to Sydney. A lifting device was required to remove the obese man from the commercial flight on arrival. His wife, so long a slave to his will, left Australia to start a new life in New Zealand.
A PSYCHIATRIST found Fleming to be ‘an intelligent, articulate man’. Two out of the three shrinks consulted said he was fit for trial, with no insanity or psychiatric defence, and the court agreed.
At trial Fleming pleaded not guilty and claimed he was in Queensland at the time. He had a special explanation for the one-in-eight-billion DNA evidence too: bent police probing the death in the 1980s may have stolen used condoms from his room and contaminated the police DNA swabs with his semen. Fleming said he noticed later that some of his used prophylactics were missing, presumed pilfered. The retired veteran detective inspector whom Fleming accused of being a rubber robber was Dennis O’Toole—the homicide sleuth who helped crack the murder cases of renowned heart surgeon Victor Chang and the six victims of granny killer John Glover.
‘The man was in charge,’ Fleming said. ‘I’m thinking he’s done something. I don’t know 100 per cent that he took it, but where did they [his two used condoms] go?’
Fleming was a difficult customer during the trial. Shuttled between jail and court, he had to be transported in a special car that could hold two wheelchairs: one for himself, and one to carry his legal documents. On the day that experts theorised about how Ms Hatty was killed, Fleming, appearing via video link from jail, fell asleep and snored, his loud pig-like grunts and noises booming forth from the court speakers.
The trial took a fortnight. Medical evidence during the case suggested Fleming might have used one of his leg bandages to strangle his victim. The jury took less than four hours to conclude that Fleming had murdered Ms Hatty. The verdict brought smiles to the faces of the dead woman’s elderly parents. When Fleming’s special car broke down on sentencing day he refused to travel in a prison truck and the hearing was delayed while the car was fixed.
The judge ordered that Fleming serve twenty-one years with a 16-year minimum. He would first be eligible for parole at the age of seventy in 2021. The sick killer’s face turned to anger after the jail term was imposed. The judge had got his attention: the defendant was no longer snoring.
The dead woman’s former boyfriend, Greg Spicer, said he was deeply relieved that the unspeakable crime had finally seen justice prevail. ‘Johanne was a beautiful, intelligent young woman who had her whole life ahead of her,’ he said. ‘Her loving family and friends have waited more than twenty-three years for this moment. The use of DNA technology in cases such as this brings hope to the families of hundreds of similar unsolved crimes around Australia.’
Fleming, the amoral amputee, had repeatedly violated the social contract. It took decades for the community to get its chance at retribution through sentencing. But in the cold case of the one-legged cat-throttling necrophiliac revenge was, in the end, best served cold.